Sad demise of Baker's Quay warehouse

I spent the middle f the day with Camilla setting up the pop-up shop on Stroud High Street which opens tomorrow for two weeks.  We are presenting Stroud Town Centre's Neighbourhood Development Plan in detail for anyone to come and view, and possibly to add their comments. I will be attending the shop to act as a volunteer at various times and answer people's questions.  Do come along if you can.

By the middle of the afternoon I drove the ten miles to Gloucester to buy fresh tofu from the Asian supermarket as well as lots of other groceries from tow supermarkets.  I took my camera bag as I intended to go down to the canal quayside at the outer edge of the old Gloucester Docks.  I had been saddened by the news last week that  one of my favourite canalside warehouses had been set alight deliberately by two teenagers and destroyed.  It made big news locally on the tv and in all the papers and the fire could be seen from thirty miles away in the Forest of Dean.

The whole area of the docks is ripe for development and there are several major warehouses right on the canal banks.  Some development has occurred and in the actual Gloucester Dock many of the warehouses have been very well regenerated as housing and retail sites.  But they outer edges have been looking more and more forlorn. I have blipped this building several times, here and here, as have several other blippers.

This is the view today from the south side looking northwards across the canal.  I knew this cyclist was approaching and decided to keep in him int the frame and I'm not surprised to see that he was also looking across at Baker's Quay.  Everyone did.  As I stood looking at it wistfully and taking a few different angled shots, I was approached by Jamie who was walking his dog.  We got into conversation and he said he was also a photographer who loved this building too.  As we spoke an elderly woman came up to us and also started talking about its loss. She said that planning permission had just been sought for the site.  My original  jaundiced view was that it might have been a judicious act of arson to make the site more easily developable, but apparently the two teenagers who were caught might just have been having 'fun'.

After I got home, Helena also returned from her day trip to Tewkesbury and called me urgently to come downstairs to see the sunset.  I grabbed my camera and from the front garden I took this 'Extra shot' of a quite stunning red sky; the best I have seen in ages.